can scarcely bewilder the brain in the open air of this mountain
land. I believe in no races like those which you tell me lie
viewless in space, as do gases. I believe not in magic; I ask not
its aids, and I dread not its terrors. For the rest, I am
confident of one mournful courage--the courage that comes from
despair. I submit to your guidance, whatever it be, as a sufferer
whom colleges doom to the grave submits to the quack who says,
'Take my specific and live!' My life is naught in itself; my life
lives in another. You and I are both brave from despair; you would
turn death from yourself--I would turn death from one I love more
than myself. Both know how little aid we can win from the
colleges, and both, therefore, turn to the promises most
audaciously cheering. Dervish or magician, alchemist or phantom,
what care you and I? And if they fail us, what then? They cannot
fail us more than the colleges do!"


V


The gold has been gained with an easy labor. I knew where to seek
for it, whether under the turf or in the bed of the creek. But
Margrave's eyes, hungrily gazing round every spot from which the
ore was disburied, could not detect the substance of which he alone
knew the outward appearance. I had begun to believe that, even in
the description given to him of this material, he had been
credulously duped, and that no such material existed, when, coming
back from the bed of the watercourse, I saw a faint, yellow gleam
amidst the roots of a giant parasite plant, the leaves and blossoms
of which climbed up the sides of the cave with its antediluvian